


Win Tsum, Lose Tsum

by buckybleeds



Series: Tsumthing Strange is Happening [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (in a flashback/nightmare), All the warnings, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Depression, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Joking about suicide, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Recovery, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicidal Thoughts, Watersports, ha ha jk...Unless? ha ha nvm, look okay rumlow puts steve in an oven and turns it on, there's no joke but i have no idea how to tag for that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24602419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckybleeds/pseuds/buckybleeds
Summary: Steve and Bucky were transformed into tsum tsums and held captive and tortured by Brock Rumlow for months.Then they got rescued.Now they're getting better.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Tsumthing Strange is Happening [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1760719
Comments: 33
Kudos: 52





	1. Hospital Rooms

**Author's Note:**

> What! Is! My! Life!
> 
> I don't even know where this is coming from this is freeform idfic

Steve looked at his hands.

He could still viscerally remember how much it had hurt to have his limbs carved off of his transformed body. He'd heard the terrible sound of Rumlow crunching the bones of his flippers between his teeth. He could barely roll himself over without them, he'd been even more helpless and useless than the initial transformation had made him.

And on his big, healthy, robust, mostly human body that translated to losing the first joint on each of his little fingers and losing both of his little toes.

Bucky had already been missing one of his little toes so he'd lost half of his second toe on his right foot.

Wanda had tried to explain it. Something about conservation of energy and the vibrations of the spirits and some weird combination of magic and science that boiled down to "technically Rumlow didn't eat your fingers and toes but functionally that's what happened."

He looked at his hands. 

Most of ten fingers.

Eight toes.

More and less than human.

He wondered when they'd take off the restraints.

***

Bucky had been watching him. But Bucky was healing too, relearning his body three months in Rumlow's hands. So Bucky slept. Bucky seemed to be getting enough sleep for both of them, which was fine because Steve wasn't getting any.

Steve hadn't really meant to try anything. He'd just been standing in the hallway. He could see the city lights through his reflection but the hall was bright and the sky was dark so the wall of windows became a mirror and he didn't mean to jump he just - 

He - 

If he could see himself than anybody else could see him too and he didn't want that, didn't want anybody ever to look at him again and he could start by breaking his reflection, crushing it, grinding it to pieces too small to look at and before he'd realized what had happened he was falling and the only thing that saved him was the empty Ironman suit Jarvis had activated when Steve's pulse tripled in the hallway. 

They put him back in the room with no mirrors and no windows and used the Hulk-proof restraints to tie him to the bed and when Bucky woke up he cried and cried and Steve had cried too but he didn't know how to promise not to do it again.

***

Talking to Sam was almost okay.

Sam had never seen him in the small form, Sam hadn't been in the room for the rescue, Sam hadn't watched him moaning in ecstasy while a rapist passed a sex toy completely through his body until he came so hard he passed out.

He could almost feel like a person around Sam.

That was something he'd lost with Bucky. Bucky knew he was just a hole.

Sam brought him a milkshake. Banana flavored. 

He caught himself tapping the cool outside of the cup with the oversensitive, overly-short tip of his little finger.

Steve still wasn't used to eating food. And he still threw up a lot. The doctors said it was psychosomatic and Steve didn't really know what that word meant, he just knew he threw up a lot because it made him feel better. It was reassuring to know he could if he needed to.

They'd been giving him a lot of calorie-dense liquids because he could usually pass those out of his stomach and get nutrients from them before he felt compelled to vomit.

Banana flavored was a novelty - Sam told Steve he'd asked the ice cream shop to make it with banana syrup instead of real bananas and it actually tasted right.

Steve liked it. He'd try not to throw it up and maybe Sam would bring him another.

He didn't talk about His Captivity with Sam. Sam wasn't his therapist. He talked to Sam about baseball and they watched games together. Steve liked that too.

***

Bucky tried to kiss him and he broke the wall.

Bucky had been sitting with him.

That was okay.

Bucky had been leaning against him.

That was okay.

Bucky had said that he loved him.

That. Hurt. That hurt but it might be okay. Someday.

Bucky turned his head and pressed his lips to Steve's temple.

That was. That was bad.

Bucky tilted his chin and his mouth brushed over Steve's with a warm hum.

Steve didn't hurt Bucky. 

He had to keep reminding himself of that after.

He didn't hurt Bucky.

He didn't hurt Bucky.

Not physically, anyway.

He'd broken the bed and scrambled backwards into the corner, plaster dust settling while Bucky cried into a telephone.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," was all that Steve could say about the situation when the doctors showed up to calm him down and restrain him again.

***

Natasha showed up and very politely asked if he'd like to accompany her to beat up some Nazis.

Steve pointed out that he wasn't allowed to leave the room.

Natasha rolled her eyes and they were in a quinjet three minutes later.

He used her phone to text Bucky that he was safe and targeting a HYDRA base with Nat.

He got a heart emoji back and smiled.

Beating up a bunch of Nazis barefoot and wearing threadbare pajamas and a hospital wristband was surprisingly cathartic.

Steve hugged Nat when she dropped him off on the landing pad. She didn't even feel compelled to walk him inside and he didn't even feel like he had to throw up, let alone jump.

He visited Bucky's room before he went back to his restricted access floor. He gave Bucky a hug and Bucky gave him a small smile and Steve took a deep breath and leaned down and very gently pressed his closed lips against Bucky's.

It was a big smile when he pulled back.

***

There were videos.

They were weird enough that nobody knew for sure what they were about - Brock had kept his face off camera so it just looked like black-gloved hands manipulating a strange stuffed animal through uncomfortably sexual scenarios. Almost nobody knew what had happened to Steve and Bucky, and nobody who didn't know would believe it.

But the videos were also weird enough that they gained a kind of cult status and got passed around and clipped and cropped and cut into reaction gifs, which is how Steve ended up seeing his face in his small form crying cold, outlined tears as an image on the board over Wrigley Field while he watched a game on TV with Sam.

Sam didn't ask why Steve had put his lunch tray through the screen, just put a warm, solid hand on his back and kept his voice low until Steve's shoulders stopped shaking.

***

He dreamed about it. In the dream, just like in his memory, it was the best thing he'd ever felt. 

***

"I know you didn't like it." 

Bucky was sitting on the bed by Steve's feet. Steve hadn't even opened his eyes.

"The way that body reacted has nothing to do with who you are and how you react to things."

"If it doesn't have anything to do with me, then how come I liked it and you didn't."

He kept his eyes closed. The world was easier when nothing could see you.

"Probably the same reason I came back missing teeth and you didn't. Because magic is stupid."

Steve snorted.

"I knew a kid who'd read twenty books about dragons and knights who'd deck you for saying so."

"Yeah?" Bucky said, and ran a hand up Steve's leg, stopping just above his knee to pat the skin and muscle. Reassuring himself it was still there. "That kid don't know shit. I can tell you, in my wide and varied travels and experiences, magic is fucking stupid."

"Well," Steve said, and strained his reach in the restraints to brush over Bucky's knuckles with his fingertips, "that's a relief. I was worried I had all the stupid right here with me."

And if Bucky cried more than he smiled at least he smiled some.

***

Sam brought him two banana milkshakes because he was a low-down, dirty rotten sneak trying to bribe Steve.

"You know that I am not your therapist," Sam said, passing one milkshake to Steve and withholding the other, "I am not your therapist, I do not want to be your therapist, there is no amount of money in the world that Stark could pay me to be your therapist and believe me he has tried. You know that, right?"

Steve sucked on his milkshake and glared at the second one in Sam's hands.

"I am well aware that they don't let people who enjoy power imbalances therapize people they have power over, and therefore there is no way you could be my therapist."

Sam held the cup high over his head.

"I am not your therapist, I am your friend, and if you aren't nice to me I'm going to take my banana milkshake with extra banana and go home."

Steve continued to glare.

"Oh Sam," he said flatly, "you are such a good friend and have such good advice that I am always willing to listen to and act on and am not being coerced into following at all."

"That's wonderful to hear, Steve. I'm so glad to know my friends feel so supported by me."

He sat down and handed Steve the second milkshake.

"Bucky came to me and cried on my shoulder and asked for help getting you help and that is not something I'm equipped to deal with, so you have got to talk to your therapist about why you want to die before your cyborg boyfriend cuddles me to death."

Steve frowned.

"Bucky came to you?"

Sam nodded grimly.

"To ask for help dealing with me?"

"It was very upsetting. I powered through."

"He cuddled you?"

"He hugged me and there were tears involved."

Steve set down his cups.

"Will you tell him I'm doing better?"

"Not a chance in hell," Sam sniffed, and stole back a milkshake.

"Hey!"

"Steve."

Steve nodded, and chewed at his thumbnail.

"I'll try. I'll really try. And I'm sorry he felt like he had to come to you instead of talking to me. That's. I don't want him to feel like he can't -" Steve sniffed, "I'll try."

Sam nodded and turned on the radio. The Dodgers were playing in Florida and the game felt like a dream.

***

"The people I care about don't want me to want to kill myself but I still want to die."

This was a new approach. All of Steve's previous sessions with Jennifer had been one-word answers that were mostly "fine."

"Okay," Jennifer said, kicking out of her ballet flats and drawing her feet up into her chair. "That's a good place to start. Does the fact that they don't want you to kill yourself matter to you?"

"Yes." Okay maybe there was something to be said about the old approach, saying that one full sentence had set Steve's teeth on edge and made his stomach heave.

"But you still want to die?"

"Yes."

She hummed.

"Okay. What do you think would be good about being dead."

"No one could look at me."

Steve frowned at his hands, as if they had made him say that. He hadn't expected that to come out of his mouth.

"You don't like being looked at?"

Steve jerked his head violently to the side.

"Is this a recent development, or something you've felt for a long time?"

He opened his mouth to bite out something sarcastic about being kept as a sexual centerpiece then paused.

He'd said he'd try. 

"I always hated it as a kid. People stared because I was so sick and small. Then I got the serum for a while it wasn't so bad. They had me do the bond shows and taught me how to talk right but they just wanted to watch the shows and didn't want me to do anything. And half of the people I met looked at me like a piece of meat and the rest looked at me like a bug in a jar." He scrubbed a hand over his face. "You know what I did before my first field action?"

Jennifer shook her head. 

"They had me do the Captain America routine for real soldiers. Soldiers who had just lost half their unit and they put me onstage to tap dance and cheer them up. I didn't like getting looked at then."

Steve twisted his hands together. He ignored the missing fingertips. 

"Then after the ice people looked at me like - I don't know, like somebody else. Like a relic. They wanted the story, wanted to see the guy from the textbooks and newsreels and museums. Even Tony, at first. Everybody at first. And I didn't know how to be what they wanted to see."

He had never been good at being what people wanted. 

People wanted sick people to be quiet and martyred and Steve had been a foul-mouthed asshole with bloody knuckles. 

People wanted their heroes to be noble and silent and chaste and brave and Steve was still a foul-mouthed asshole with bloody knuckles but he was also afraid and tired and wanted to disappear into his best friend's bed for the rest of his life. 

"Bucky's the only one who never bothered me when he looked because he always listened too."

Steve wasn't sure when he'd started crying. 

"And then this. Thing. The. Brock. He -" Steve gagged.

Jennifer offered him a box of tissues and pointed out the trash can by his knee but otherwise didn't interrupt.

"He liked using me, liked watching me liking what he was doing, but more than that it was - he liked having me on display. He set up scenes for him and Buck to watch," he hissed through his teeth with how much that hurt, "he took video. Bucky saw, he saw - saw how much I liked it and there's video of it on the internet and I can't, I can't -"

Steve was hyperventilating and Jennifer's voice was as soothing and even as a metronome. 

"Four, and out - one, two, three, four, five -"

Steve breathed in time to her words and didn't throw up and maybe that's what progress looked like.

***

In the dream Bucky was human. 

Steve was a weird little limbless monster and Bucky was perfect and human and whole and Steve was begging for him. 

He couldn't make words so he moaned hungrily and arched his back and rocked his vestigial hips. 

Bucky's face curled into a contemptuous sneer. His flesh hand held Steve down. The metal hand shoved into Steve with four fingers and he beeped frantically, desperately.

The hand pressed in all the way, bulky and huge, the bulge of the thumb joint nearly tearing him in two as it was forced into him. He came so hard he blacked out. 

When he opened his eyes it was to warmth and wetness. 

His hole was open and awful and overflowing with what Steve slowly realized was urine. Bucky had wrenched him open just to piss into him and it was running out of him and soaking the table he was duct taped to. 

The stream stopped and a plug was pushed into him, forcing more liquid to run out of him and further fouling him. 

Steve woke with a gasp and clamped a hand over his mouth as his stomach heaved. He remembered himself and where he was as the sweat dried slowly on his overheated skin. 

The tower. He was on the medical floor of Stark's tower. Bucky was two floors away and had never hurt Steve like that. Would never hurt Steve like that. It had been Rumlow. It was all Rumlow. 

Steve dithered for a minute then picked up his phone and pecked out a polite message to Jennifer, asking if she had time for him in the morning. 

***

They were watching a movie off The List and Steve was trying what Jennifer had described as "relearning safe touch."

He held Bucky's hand, he picked it up and kissed the back of it. Bucky put his head in his lap and Steve petted his hair. 

Bucky was nearly preening with the attention and it made Steve feel soft and awful at the same time - Bucky had gone through the same ordeal as Steve, he needed to get better too.

It made Steve dizzy with wrath to think of Brock's hands on the sweet, funny, healing man currently draped all over Steve's lap and melting as his hair was played with. 

Steve put his anger and his shame and his sadness aside. He was watching a beautifully animated movie about a unicorn, he was watching it with the man he'd loved for the better part of a hundred years. There was nobody else in the room so he didn't need to bring them into his head and let them take up space there. 

He was looking at Bucky more than at the screen. He was working up to wondering if he should kiss him when he heard it. 

"What have you done," the television said. Steve looked at the screen and where the unicorn had been there was now a pale woman, clumsy and coltish, trapped in a body that wasn't hers. 

Steve's mouth dropped open and Bucky's lax body stiffened in his lap.

They watched the unicorn and her friends be allowed into the castle. They watched the king's fascination with her and saw the prince fall in love. They saw the daring escape, saw the unicorn made into herself again. 

Steve's eyes began to tear up. He knew how this kind of story worked. Now love would change her back. She would leave the other unicorns to be with her prince. 

But she didn't. 

She was herself again and she stayed that way. 

A song played over the credits and the screen went dark. 

Steve didn't say anything. Bucky didn't say anything. He just slowly moved to straddle Steve's legs and wrapped his arms around Steve's neck and they breathed together into the silence and held each other for a long, long time. 

***

Wanda came to visit.

Steve hadn't seen her since she'd used her powers to fix him and Bucky, though he'd heard her voice in the halls. 

She'd seen him. Found him. She knew almost better than anyone what he'd done. 

It was hard to be around her. 

"Steve. There's something we need to talk about."

He gave her a strained smile, uncertain where this was was going. She offered him a hand, he took it. 

"I've been working with Thor and Doctor Strange. We have been exploring Doom's weapon, reverse engineering it."

Steve nodded and forced himself not to tighten his hand on hers, not to crush her slim fingers as he wrested with the idea that more people were learning what he'd done. 

"Steve. The transformation isn't permanently reversed."

He felt all the blood fall out of his face and Wanda winced as his hand clamped down on hers. 

"We're going to change back," he whispered, struggling against the tightness growing in his chest. 

"No! No, Steve, not like that," she forced his hand open with a little wisp of red energy and grasped his shoulder instead. "The transformation is stable. You're not going to wake up as a creature again. Not unless you want to."

"What," he was startled enough by the idea of wanting to be one of those things that it interrupted his rising panic. 

"You can change. You can choose to change, you and Sergeant Barnes. You can become the creature and then become yourself again."

"What," her words weren't making any sense - he didn't want to be that thing, never wanted to be that thing. 

"We can show you how to change, but, Steve," she snapped her fingers and released a bright spark to get Steve's attention back from his bewilderment, "we can show you how to change back. We can make sure no one can ever trap you in that body again."


	2. Training Rooms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst?  
> Is this angst?  
> Pretty sure that's what's happening here.

Jennifer had had to come to his room, he couldn't make himself leave. 

He'd graduated from flannel pants and robes to track pants and sweatshirts last week, so he did feel at least vaguely human when she came in. 

Vaguely human was good. Jennifer wanted him to work on identifying the things that made him feel alienated. Apparently dressing like an invalid was one of those things. 

Being told he could transform himself into the tiny hypersexual lump he'd been violently raped as for three months was another one of those things. 

She hadn't seen his room since he'd started acting like therapy was worth more than a fart in a windstorm and he saw her seeing the fact that the scratchy hospital blanket had been replaced by a quilt from home and noticing the books and paper scraps and little personal things scattered around the room. 

"Don't get cocky," he admonished, "I'm about to have a significant setback, what if it's because you're a bad therapist?"

Jennifer sniffed. 

"I'm an excellent therapist and you're not allowed to deprecate me or yourself, Rogers. I'll get as cocky as I want. It's nice to see you reestablishing your space in the world."

A panicky bray of laughter tore itself out of his mouth. Jennifer frowned at him. 

"Spit it out before you choke on it."

"Wanda says I can change back into the thing, she's going to show me and she's already showed Bucky and I think I'd rather kill myself."

Jennifer nodded, set down her purse, and folded herself into the uncomfortable visitors' chair as elegantly as if she was settling into the modernist furniture of her office. 

"Do you actually want to kill yourself or are you panicking and that seems like the only way to get out of this?"

Steve flopped onto the bed and pointed at her. 

"That thing, the second one. I don't want to do this and I don't know how to get out of it."

"Have you tried telling people 'I don't want to do this?'"

Steve scoffed. 

"That's not going to work. There are really good reasons to try it and they think it's to keep me safe so they're not going to let it go."

"Could you tell them it scares you and say you want to wait?"

"No," he sighed, and shoved himself into a seated position. "Captain America doesn't get to be scared of missions, they'll want me to get over it."

Jennifer drummed her fingers on her knee. 

"Steve," she said gently, "do you really think that your friends would ignore it if you said 'no' right now."

He didn't answer. 

"Have you talked to them or are you panicking because you're afraid you'll say no and they'll make you do it anyway?"

He pointed at her. 

"Second one," he whispered. 

"I can work with that."

***

Bucky was with him in their enhanced gym. They were running simple drills and both failing more than they would like. 

It turns out that even little toes matter a lot for balance. 

They weren't talking. 

Not because they _weren't talking_ , just because Steve didn't talk a lot these days and so other people didn't talk a lot right along with him. 

"What was it like," he said, abruptly. He'd been sitting on the mat catching his breath and suddenly the words were there. 

Bucky paused his routine, which meant he was sort of just casually hanging off the wall he'd been scaling, but didn't say anything. 

"Being the - the little. Being like that again, what was it like?"

Bucky jumped lightly down from the wall and stalked over to flop down next to Steve on the floor. 

"Pretty normal. With just Wanda and Nat in the room it wasn't," he stopped and reached out to grab Steve's hand, "being little wasn't the bad thing."

Steve mulled that over. 

"I feel like I'm what was bad about it. I feel like he - like it wouldn't have been like that if I hadn't liked it."

Bucky hummed. 

"That's bullshit. Rumlow's a sadist. He didn't care that it got you off, he just wanted to hurt you."

Steve covered his eyes with his arm. 

"Then why'd he only do things that got me off?"

"First of all, he didn't, that's, that's confirmation bias or typical mind or some other kind of psych 101 fallacy," Bucky sounded annoyed. "He did a ton of awful stuff, like eating your fucking legs, that didn't make you horny. You just remember what made you hard more than you remember him putting cigarettes out on your balls."

Steve groaned. 

"Yeah, because I'm gross and horny and he knew that at some level I wanted it."

Bucky poked Steve hard in the ribs with his metal hand. 

"No, idiot. Because you hated it more when you were aroused. Because it wasn't just your squad leader betraying you it was your actual, physical body and you couldn't get away from it. You remember it more because it was more helpless and more invasive and it made you hate yourself and that's exactly why he did it. Rumlow didn't want to make you feel good, he wanted you to be disgusted with yourself because he forced you to feel pleasure and you couldn't stop it. Because he's a fucking sadist."

Bucky practically shouted the last few words. 

Steve's answer seemed quiet in comparison. 

"Well he must be good at it because it fucking worked."

Bucky sighed and flopped onto his back. 

"You're an asshole for making me say this, Rogers," Steve propped himself up on an elbow to look at Bucky. 

"They used to like it if they could make me come when I was getting hurt. It got to be a contest. 'Can the Asset come if we're face fucking it,' 'Can the Asset come while its tongue is slit in half,' 'Can the Asset come if you fuck your fist inside its asshole.' It turns out the answer to all of those questions is 'yeah, if you try hard enough to make it happen.' So. Tell me how much I wanted it, Steve. Tell me how I was asking for it."

Steve shook his head.

"It's not the same."

"Yeah? Tell me how it's different."

Steve laid back and fished around between their bodies until he found a hand to hold. 

"Do you want to be the Soldier again?"

Bucky took his hand back. 

"Of course not."

Steve shrugged and stared at the ceiling. 

"Then that's how it's different."

Steve had caught his breath. He went back to running combinations on training dummies and eventually Bucky went back to his wall. 

***

Steve made it down to the fourh floor in almost-normal-people clothes, bought two decaf unsweetened almond milk lattes and a bag full of pastries, tipped well, and made it to Jennifer's office on the sixtieth floor with time to spare. 

"It felt so good when Brock was fucking me that sometimes I wish I was still the little thing and that no one had rescued us and I don't know how to process that emotion."

Jennifer took a sip of her latte.

"Sex has never, ever felt that good to me and I'm scared that it's never going to feel as good with someone else and I'm scared that I want to be that thing forever."

Jennifer looked at him over her glasses. 

"And since we got out everything has felt bad. Talking to Bucky feels bad, hanging out with Sam feels bad, talking to you feels bad. Though talking to you is getting better."

Jennifer smiled like a shark. 

"Why is it getting better to talk to me instead of Sam?"

Steve bit his lip and picked at the paper seam of his coffee cup. 

"You didn't know me before. You just have 'fucked up trauma victim with four flavors of PTSD' as your baseline for me. And Tony is paying you for this so you're not just tolerating me because you feel guilty. And you don't run screaming when I say something really awful about what happened to me and I admire that about you."

"Hm. Is there anyone who has run screaming when they find out what happened to you?"

Steve had to think about that. 

"Not screaming. Not running. Tony hasn't looked at me since he found me, though. And Thor -"

Thor's response had been terrifying.

Apparently he'd been nearly frantic in his search for the missing supersoldiers and when he'd found out how they had been captured, who had them, and what sort of recovery they would need he had tried to pull Rumlow out of his hospital bed and pound him into a fine paste with his hammer. 

Steve halfway wished he'd succeeded, but the Asgardian's wounded bellow of rage had shaken something deep inside of Steve. 

"Thor acts like we're dead. Like he's mourning us."

"And that's another thing that feels bad."

"Right. All I do is fight with Bucky and make everyone else uncomfortable and let them down. So sometimes it seems like things were better before I was found because at least then they could still think well of me and even though everything was horrible at least it felt good."

Jennifer took another sip of her latte.

"Yeah, I'm gonna have to call bullshit."

It always startled him when she said things like that. Doctors weren't supposed to swear.

"You don't get to decide what other people think of you and I'm fairly certain your friends do still think well of you. But I've got some good news that might help you believe that."

Steve raised an eyebrow at her. 

"People are incredibly self-centered and if Tony and Thor are avoiding you that probably has noting to do with their opinion of you and everything to do with them feeling guilty."

"The fact that Tony has dismissed heliocentrisim in favor of believing the universe revolves around him lends credence to your theory. But what do they have to feel guilty for?"

She smiled at him before leaning forward and selecting a danish.

"That's your homework. Ask them," she took a big, sugary bite, and then spoke around it, "and stop treating your friends like idiots. If they didn't get anything out of spending time with you they wouldn't do it. Besides, you're fucking hilarious. 'Heliocentrisim,' I swear."

***

"Do you feel guilty about what happened to me?"

Tony was elbow-deep in what looked like the genetic cross of a muscle car engine and a swan. He sat up quickly and bumped his head on the shop light he'd clipped above the work area.

"Ow - fuck - what - if I have ever given you the impression that I'm the kind of guy you can drop 'feelings' conversations on I would like to do whatever it takes to change that impression immediately."

Steve picked up a screwdriver from Tony's workbench and started tossing it to himself for something to do with his hands.

"I'm traumatized, humor me."

"Oh, thank god, you're an asshole again. I missed you," Tony said snarkily. It actually came off as pretty sincere but Steve wasn't about to comment on that. 

"You've been avoiding me and my therapist says it's probably because you feel guilty and not because you think I'm disgusting."

"Jesus." Tony picked up a rag and wiped grease off his hands. "Well. I guess I'm paying her for something. Yeah. I feel like shit about it."

"Well that's stupid, knock it off."

"There are thousands - " Tony started, then choked. "Tens of thousands of ways I could have put a tracker in your suit or your shield and I just didn't do it."

"You can do it now. We learned."

"Do you know how we found you? It was Wanda's idea. Vibranium. We did global satellite scans for vibranium in decreasing amounts until we finally got to the shield."

"And you got us out."

"It took _months_ \- " Tony's voice escalated to a shout and his fist came down on the worktable hard enough to make his tools jump, " _months_ , because I didn't think to share any of the tech I was using for my suit with you. Months, because I didn't come up with something faster."

Steve nodded. 

"It did. I'm glad you got us out that fast. If someone else had been working on the problem it might have taken years or just never happened."

"Stop, just stop - stop trying to make this okay." 

Steve slapped Tony affectionately on the shoulder.

"If it's not supposed to be okay for you how is it ever supposed to be okay for me," he asked, and made his way back to the elevator. 

***

Bucky was attempting a new stroganoff recipe and Steve was sitting at the island breakfast bar enjoying watching him chop mushrooms. Steve was making an effort to eat his meals outside of the medical floors.

"Does it hurt?"

He was really going to have to start planning to have these conversations instead of just throwing words into silence.

Bucky frowned and looked at the mushrooms and then back to Steve.

"No?"

The look of confusion on his face was pretty cute.

"No, the - being the little thing. Does it hurt to change?"

"Oh. No to that too then." 

He drummed his fingers on the countertop and watched as Bucky started to heat oil in a heavy, cast-iron pan.

"And you can just change? Just go back and forth whenever?"

"Yeah."

"Is it hard?"

Bucky shook salt and caraway seeds into the hot oil.

"It was the first few times, but now it's so easy it feels like blinking."

Steve chewed on his lip. 

"You've practiced it a lot?"

Bucky shook his head and poked a spatula into the frying spices. He added some paprika to the mix.

"No. Just a few times."

"But it's easy now?"

"Yeah."

"Can you show me?"

He looked up from his pan to give Steve a long, assessing stare. He must have liked what he saw.

"After dinner."

The stroganoff was good. Savory and tangy and rich.

Bucky said it tasted like home and Steve didn't have the heart to tell him that he'd never eaten anything like that prior to 1945. Home meant different things now. A handler who gave him a bowl of good food was a better home for Bucky than a lot of the places he'd been. 

They sat on the couch after, overhead lights turned off with just lamps and the glow of the city beyond the windows for illumination. It made things softer. Less clinical. Bucky was in soft black joggers and a gray workout tank, his hair in a little bun but escaping in wisps around his face. 

"I'm right here, I'll be right back. If you get scared just ask me and I'll switch back. It only takes a second, it doesn't hurt. Okay?"

"O-okay," Steve said. He had his cellphone on the table, there was a timer on it, three minutes. Bucky wouldn't be the thing for more than three minutes.

"Okay, honey. Here goes," Bucky murmured, and just like that there wasn't a big, safe body kneeling next to Steve on the couch, there was a warm little weight in his lap and the Bucky-thing was staring up at him.

Every muscle in Steve's body seemed to turn to stone.

It was a nightmare, it was like all his nightmares, it was a little tube of helpless flesh beeping up at him and he could stick it in the microwave or throw it in the freezer or just step on it and slowly squish the life out of it and it would die so easy - 

And then Bucky was back, straddling Steve's lap and wrapping his arms around Steve's shoulders and smelling like coconut conditioner and paprika and Steve was grabbing onto him and biting down on a scream and shaking too hard to speak.

That was okay. Bucky was talking.

"Shhh, shh, I'm right here, didn't go anywhere, didn't get hurt, nobody touched me, just went into it and right back, easy as breathing, you're okay, you're okay honey, I've gotcha pal," and other sweet, stupid little platitudes washed over him.

Nothing bad had happened.

Nothing bad had happened.

It was enough.

For now.


	3. Basements

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thank you to @tomix for relentlessly cheerleading this tire fire of a fic. <3
> 
> There is a lot of recovery in this but also a good chunk of trash.
> 
> If you are in this for recovery only and do not want any torture porn skip from "Steve was going to die like this" to "Steve's knees hit the tile..."

There was an underground range at Stark Tower. Bucky liked to get some time on the line twice a week even though he chafed at the fact that it was a glorified pistol range with a maximum target distance of fifty yards. 

Steve wondered where Tony tested the suit's rockets. He'd have to ask. If you could test rockets you could set up a 600 yard range, surely. 

Bucky was throwing knives at ten yards, and doing a pretty good job of it, like he did everything. 

Steve was trying out a Skorpion.

It was an okay gun but Steve thought it was probably better at accentuating Bucky's shoulders than it was at throwing lead downrange.

Maybe it'd look good between Steve's shoulders. He had to have _something_ in the harness to make up for the missing shield. 

Wanda had been able to fix Bucky and Steve but nothing that she and Tony tried was able to restore the shield to something larger than a saucer. 

They'd ended up sending it to Wakanda, hopeful that Shuri would be able to reverse the damage done by Dr. Doom's magical mystery gun. 

Bucky was packing up his knives, he'd already spent an hour with his carbines and handguns and that meant it was time to go. 

Steve perked up like a puppy who'd heard the word 'walk.'

"Try not to look too excited, Rogers, it's just a movie."

After-range time meant gun-cleaning time. Since cleaning guns was repetitive and boring it was nice to have a movie in the background. Since cleaning guns also meant careful reassembly it helped if the movie was something you'd already seen. 

After-range time had become The Last Unicorn time. 

Steve usually didn't actually help with cleaning guns, he usually sat on the couch with a sketchbook on his lap next to Bucky, who would have his coffee table covered in a dropcloth and scattered with springs and pins and brushes. 

The comforting smell of the gun oil, the weight and heat of Bucky at his side, the songs from the movie, the quick gesture sketches of unicorns and sorcerers and bulls and skeletons - all of that was what Jennifer would describe as _grounding_.

Steve just thought of it as a part of the week where he didn't feel like shit about anything. 

***

After the movie Bucky had lunch and Steve pointedly didn't. 

They shot the shit and cleaned up the cleaning area, returning Bucky's living room to its normal, comforting, grounding arrangement. 

"Okay, I'm ready."

Steve put his cellphone on the table, a timer already counting down from twenty minutes. He laid across the length of the couch and put an arm behind his head. 

Bucky crawled on top of him. 

It was bittersweet. 

Having the large body above him and between his legs was terrifying but in the last couple of weeks there'd been something else there too. Not quite arousal but a dim chime in the back of his mind reminding him that he used to like this view for very good reasons. 

"Wait," Steve said, and impulsively put his hands on Bucky's hips. He sat up out of his reclined pose and kissed Bucky firmly and sweetly on his soft red lips. "Now I'm ready," he said, and laid back again. 

Bucky carefully leaned down over Steve and kissed him right back. 

"See you in a few minutes, honey," and shifted into the little Bucky.

The warm little weight was balanced on Steve's stomach and it snuggled down into Steve's chest where he awkwardly patted at it.

It was kind of like holding a dog. 

Kind of. 

Steve had to hold the little tube carefully in place or it might roll off of him and hit the ground with a thud and a squawk and Steve did better when there weren't any noises. 

It was. 

It was not great.

His heart was jackrabbiting in his chest and he felt a little panicky but he wasn't going to throw up or scream. 

It was not great. 

But it wasn't terrible either. 

***

"I get what you mean about wanting to stay like that."

Steve didn't look up from his sketchbook, didn't ask questions. 

"Things are simpler like that. Sensations are stronger, emotions are clearer."

Steve shakily added some shading to Schmendrick the Magician.

"I didn't - the things Rumlow did didn't feel physically good to me. All they did was hurt, and because things are simpler like that they're also louder, I guess."

Steve picked out a white pencil to add highlights. 

"I like being like that around you, is what I'm trying to say."

The pencil stopped moving. 

"I couldn't - it would be hard. For me. I couldn't be still with you like this. Let you pet me and hum at me. Take a nap on your chest. But. When I'm little - it's simpler."

Bucky reached out with his metal hand and rested it on top of Steve's knee. 

"I love you. I always want to be with you. But it's - you can only think one thing at a time like that, right? So you only think about how good it feels and not about how guilty you are for feeling good."

Steve set down the sketchbook and took Bucky's hand. He picked it up and kissed the cold knuckles. 

"I wish everything in my life was as simple as loving you," he said, and after that they were close and quiet for a long time. 

***

Steve was going to die like this. 

Rumlow liked to fill him up. Sometimes he used toys or guns, sometimes he picked up whatever he had around.

Rumlow had gotten a call from Doom halfway through using Steve and had to leave in a hurry, so Rumlow had rolled up a tattered copy of Field & Stream and stuffed it inside of him before shoving him into the oven.

The magazine had started out twisted into a tight tube but Steve's abused body was too loose and lax to keep it that way and it slowly unfurled, opening him up from the inside until it was twice the size it had started at. He whimpered and squirmed and hated himself for the way he got hard from being filled with literal trash. 

He fell asleep like that, and didn't hear it when Rumlow came back, but he did hear it when the gas started hissing and lit on the pilot light. 

Brock was home, and he'd turned on the oven. 

Steve's first instinct was to scream but he made himself hyperventilate instead, puffing in quick breaths to saturate his blood with oxygen and expand his lungs as much as possible before he took one last deep breath. He'd learned from last time, and didn't want to be burning and suffocating at the same time. 

It was an old oven and it heated slowly. Rumlow had pulled out the top two racks and left the low center rack, so Steve at least was above the oven floor, but the wire underneath him would start burning soon. 

Without his stupid little paddle limbs he couldn't attempt to jump or throw himself at the oven door - which was just as well, he could see Brock leering at him from the other side of the greasy glass - and the magazine inside of him was stiff and inflexible, even somewhat unrolled, so he couldn't curl himself up to twist or roll his useless little body.

He was a little worried that the paper inside of him would start to burn but he almost wished it would. Maybe that would kill him when all the previous times in the oven hadn't. 

It was getting recognizably hot. Steve had spent a few days in Las Vegas with Nat once, and had been patently offended by the temperatures that assaulted them when they left the casino. This felt like that. Probably no hotter than a hundred and twenty degrees yet. 

Steve focused on staying calm and preserving his oxygen. If he survived this at all the burns would heal, it didn't matter if the metal rack below him charred through the skin, what mattered was keeping the burning limited to the outside. It occurred to him that that was impossible - the magazine holding him open was letting hot air move into him. He kept holding his breath anyway. 

He felt the strange white tears this body made start to run down his face. Heard them hit the bottom of the oven and sizzle away. So it was at least two hundred degrees a few inches below him. It couldn't be that hot in the center of the appliance. He'd be dead. It would have killed him, surely. 

He breathed out slowly, carefully measured. He wasn't sure what he'd be breathing in when he finally emptied his lungs, but he knew it would hurt.

Just when Steve was sure he'd have to start breathing - and screaming - Rumlow opened the door and reached inside to pull Steve out with a mismatched set of oven mitts protecting his hands. The incongruous domesticity of that might have made Steve laugh if he had the air for it. Instead he just twitched feebly as Rumlow set him down on the blessedly cool surface of the table. 

"You hit a new record, big guy. You were at two forty for three minutes and you didn't even start whining" Steve felt an awful, dry pulling inside of himself as the magazine was removed. There was a clicking, squirting sound, and Rumlow's cock, barely slick with lube, was pushing inside of him. 

"F-fuck, sweetheart, you feel so good like this," Rumlow panted as he fucked in deep. 

Steve was still too detached from his body to feel any fresh horror at what was happening. All he knew was that the table was cool against his overheated skin and that he wasn't in the oven anymore. That was all that mattered, in the end. He was rocked against the table, large hands circled his small body, and the dingy kitchen faded as Steve let himself slip into unconsciousness. 

***

Steve's knees hit the tile before he was even fully awake and he blinked tears out of his eyes over an empty white toilet while his stomach heaved and he tried to decide if he was going to throw up.

He breathed like Jennifer had taught him to. In one-two-three-four, hold one-two-three-four, out one-two-three-four, hold one-two-three-four, repeat.

He was human, in a bathroom at the tower.

And repeat.

He had been released from the hospital floor a week ago, he was wearing his favorite sweatshirt, the sweatshirt he'd fallen asleep in.

And repeat.

He wasn't going to throw up.

Steve had been excited to move back into the suite he'd shared with Bucky before. He'd been a little upset that he needed to set up a bed on the futon in his office instead of sleeping in the master bedroom, but Bucky had been pleased with Steve's assertion that he wasn't ready to share space. 

He could say these things now. He could say what he needed or what would hurt him and Buck listened. Bucky was proud of him when he said 'no.' Bucky liked it when Steve set boundaries, even if they didn't make sense to him at first.

Steve stayed on the tile. The bathroom floor was cool and a little bit sharp on his knees. He fell asleep there and it was so bright and clean and chrome that for once he woke up and didn't have a moment of panic about where he was.

He went to find Bucky. Steve needed to talk to Wanda.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did research. It turns out that humans can survive at SHOCKINGLY high air temperatures for short amounts of time so long as the air is dry. Since Tsum!Steve is more resilient than even Captain America in some ways I figured a couple minutes at a horrible temperature wouldn't kill him before the serum and tsum magic could heal him.


End file.
